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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Simplifications are dangerous at the best of times and the same may be said of applications of general principle to particular circumstance. In this vein it seems appropriate to offer some thoughts on the recent document of the Episcopal Conference of England and Wales entitled The Common Good. A document which purports to offer a moral diagnosis on a specific socio-economic context is, like a surgeon, heavily dependent on antecedent data in arriving at that diagnosis and thence at a remedy for ills detected. In this short study we cannot hope to conflate the entire corpus of Catholic Social Teaching into a few words but it may be helpful to focus on the diagnostic aspects of the recent document of the Conference, viewing it as essentially applicative of previous interventions of the Roman magisterium, and thus be able to discern some possible avenues of interpretation for the future.
Diagnosing the problem, especially with regard to socio-economic conditions, must offer the ecclesiastical spectator the most challenging of tasks, given the shifting and undulating nature of the economic landscape. The historio-genesis of the first official contribution to the problem, Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum, bears this out, and yet there are a number of observations from that document which would resonate well with even the most sceptical of economic analyses of our time. Thus Leo XIII observed:
A tiny group of extravagantly rich men have been able to lay upon the great multitude of unpropertied workers a yoke that is little better than that of slavery itself (RN 2).
Priest of the Diocese of Northampton.
2 Episcopal Conference of England & Wales, The Common Good. London, 1996.Google Scholar
3 Cf. The Collected Writings of J. M.Keynes, (London, 1973), vol. 29, p. 81.Google Scholar
4 Cf. Pope John Paul II, Evangelium vitae, n 70. For the implications of the document in democratic societies, see my article “An Ambrosian Right ‐ Church and State after Evangelium vitae”, in New Blackfriars 77 (1996) 146.Google Scholar
5 There is also the deeper question of die nature of power that becomes unhinged from responsibility (cf. Romano Guardini, Power and Responsibility, tr. Briefs, E. C. [Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1961], 50–51).Google Scholar
6 At present we live with a system that, from the point of view of adopted value systems, is apparently neutral, a “secular” society, but we would do well to take on board the observations of Allan Bloom with regard to what this means for social cohesion (cfr. Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind, [ New York: Simon and Shuster, 1987], 87).Google Scholar
7 Cf. Scott, Meikle, “Adam Smith and the Spanish Inquisition,” in New Blackfriars, 76 (1995)78.Google Scholar
8 There is also a price to be paid for the elevation of individual liberty above communitarian restraint. Maclntyre comments: “The democratised self which has no necessary social content and no necessary social identity can then be anything, can assume any role or take any point of view, because it is in and for itself nothing” (Maclntyre, A., After Virtue, (Notre Dame University: UND Press, 1981], 30)Google Scholar. For a response to Maclntyre see the collection After Maclntyre, Morton, J. ed., (Oxford: Blackwells, 1994).Google Scholar
9 This would undoubtedly be the argument of the Government which was elected in 1979. What is the ethical response to a situation in which trades unions no longer hold secret ballots and exercise block voles at party political conferences as well as effectively exercising some power over Government economic policy? Such a scenario is not addressed by an unqualified assertion of the traditional Catholic option in favour of workers rights to associate in trades union movements.
10 Such a distinction was drawn in a response of Cardinal Ratzinger to specific applications of the American pastoral on the economy in which Catholics working on defence contracts ipso facto seemed to be the subject of censure by their ecclesiastical pastors.
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